“Scale: The Data Platform for AI; High Quality Training and Validation Data for AI Applications”, (; backlinks; similar):
[”Scale is an API for training data, providing access to human-powered data for a multitude of use cases located in San Francisco, California, United States; founded 2016-06-01. Scale accelerates the development of AI applications by helping computer vision teams generate high-quality ground truth data. Our advanced LiDAR, video, and image annotation APIs allow self-driving, drone, and robotics teams at companies like Waymo, OpenAI, Lyft, Zoox, Pinterest, and Airbnb focus on building differentiated models vs. labeling data.“]
[”Scale has around 100 employees, according to Wang, but its limited full-time staff is a small fraction of the human-power behind the services Scale offers. The startup has nearly 30,000 contractors aiding in the labeling process. “The humans are pretty critical to what we’re doing because they’re there to make sure that all the data we provide is really high quality”, Wang says.
Companies provide Scale with data via their API and the startup puts its resources to work labeling the text, audio, pictures and video so that its customers’ machine learning models can be trained. The startup’s customers include Waymo, OpenAI, Airbnb and Lyft.
For a customer working with autonomous driving data, Scale’s services may mean taking collected video frames and manually segmenting out individual cars, humans or other obstacles. For another customer, it can mean making common sense language connections to ensure natural language processing models can understand language in context. The “human insight” can help minimize labeling bias and give customers data that is more precise and more accurate, though, as with just about all AI startups, the hope is that these insights will gradually usher in a future where reliance on these humans-in-the-loop will be lessened. In the meantime, Scale sits atop an army of contractors that might hold the key to bulking up Silicon Valley’s machine learning intelligence.“]